Add Verizon To The Growing List Of Companies Tap Dancing Around Net Neutrality With Zero Rating

from the preferential-treatment dept

Verizon says it will soon join the growing list of companies collectively tap dancing around the country's net neutrality rules. The company says it will soon start engaging in "zero rating," or the process of letting some content (read: the companies willing to pay entrenched telecom providers a toll) bypass an ISP's monthly data usage caps. Company executive Marni Walden says Verizon's going to begin trials of a new zero rating program sometime in the next few weeks, with plans to more seriously deploy the efforts sometime in the early part of 2016:

"The capabilities we’ve built allow us to break down any byte that is carried across our network and have all or a portion of that sponsored,” Verizon Executive VP Marni Walden said during a wide-ranging interview this week...Sponsored data, as the name implies, allows consumers to access certain content without having to eat into their own data plans. Instead, a third party pays for it.
Verizon is working with just a few partners in the testing phase, but said next year this feature will be available to all comers at an affordable rate.

“We’ll be out in a larger commercial way in the first quarter of 2016,” Walden said.

For the record, Verizon's definition of "affordable" is likely not the same as everyone else's. Taking a look at Verizon's patent filing from earlier this year, the service functions much like AT&T's controversial sponsored data program, which lets companies pay AT&T a premium in order for their apps and content to get special, highlighted, cap-exempt status:

"The device determines whether the data usage is sponsored by a sponsor based on the identifier and the information associated with the data usage...The device assigns charges for the data usage to an account associated with the user device when the data usage is not sponsored by the sponsor, or to an account associated with the sponsor when the data usage is sponsored by the sponsor."

That's a lot of sponsoring. More simply, the technology lets you pay Verizon to get a leg up over your competitors, who may not be able to afford to pay Verizon for the same privilege. It's an idea that's been highly criticized for the fact that it puts smaller companies (and especially independents and nonprofits) at a distinct and immediate market disadvantage. And while some implementations of zero rating may seem better than others (like T-Mobile's Binge On, which exempts all video from usage caps), the precedent of giving an ISP this kind of authority remains troubling to those intimate with the telecom industry's long, long history of anti-competitive behavior.

And because the FCC's net neutrality rules didn't specifically ban zero rating, so far the agency has been happy to look the other way as companies "experiment" with giving select content preferential treatment. Not only have Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon all started experimenting with zero rating, but Comcast last month announced it would be exempting its own streaming service from its usage caps, giving it a distinct leg up in its fight against Netflix. And because the companies involved have marketed the practice as "toll free shipping" or a "1-800 number" for data to consumers and the media, the obvious distortion of the once-level playing field of the Internet economy has been met with thunderous applause.

Re:

Gotta admit I'm embarrassed. As long as this zero-rating nonsense has been an issue, it wasn't until this particular comment that I had a "duh moment" and realized that a lot of security and privacy-oriented practices make taking advantage of 'free' bandwidth impossible. Lovely.

Re: Re:

What they don't tell you is that zero-rated video is super-compressed. The quality is pretty bad. I think as long as the program is run like T-Mobile runs it (anybody can join, you just have to agree to severe bandwidth limits) I don't have a problem with it.

Somewhat related, Satellite company DishTV is offering free Netflix or NFL with new subscriptions. Is giving free access to paid services anti-competitive in non-internet settings too?

Re:

But normal network data has significantly more '0's than '1's. That means whoever is sponsoring '0's ends up footing the majority of the bill, and since this is all about maintaining fairness, that's unacceptable.

BingeOn Is Selective

Not true. BingeOn exempts certain video services, but excludes such "minor" sites as YouTube and Amazon Instant Video. Also, it downgrades the quality of ALL streamed video to 480p, even on sites that aren't zero-rated.

And while some implementations of zero rating may seem better than others (like T-Mobile's Binge On, which exempts all video from usage caps)

Define "all". If I'm talking on Skype to my sister and she's showing me the latest cute thing my two-year-old nephew learned to do, is that exempt? Because it's definitely video. (And if so, is it still exempt if I only use audio? Because that's not video, but it takes much less bandwidth, which messes with your behavioral incentives a little...)